You searched for book_author:"Jacqueline Carey"
Dark Currents, the anticipated debut to Jacqueline Carey’s new urban fantasy series Agent of Hel, got my attention back when it first came out. I saw it on io9, added it to my to-read list.
And promptly forgot about it.
Because that’s what happens when you have a list so long that even if you stop adding books to it today, it will take you about four years to get through it.
Fortunately,…
It was only three weeks into knitting my SEKRIT PROJECT that has left me high and dry for reading time that I remembered audiobooks are a thing … good job, Ben.
Santa Olivia is some dystopian SF from Jacqueline Carey, whom I better know from Kushiel’s Dart and its umpteen spin-offs, as well as the Agent of Hel urban fantasy series (damn, I still crave more of those). In this novel, Carey turns her hand…
Poison Fruit, like Autumn Bones, does not let much time elapse between books. The events of Halloween are still fresh in people’s minds as New Year approaches. Now Daisy has to get to the bottom of what the hell-spawn lawyer Daniel Dufreyne is doing buying up land around Little Niflheim. And she also needs to sort out her complicated feelings about her attractions to Stefan and Cody.
I’ll start off with the romance…
Both perverse pleasures and particular perils accompany the act of reading, for the first time, two consecutive books in a series back to back. The pleasures are obvious: having devoured that first morsel, you eagerly consume all else within reach. Sometimes years pass between my readings of books in a series, and by then I’ve forgotten all the characters, and the nods to previous books are much less satisfying. The perils are not necessarily universal.…
Now that’s how you end a series.
Naamah’s Blessing is the swan song of Moirin, half–Maghuin Dhonn, half-D’Angeline. Moirin has ventured as far eastwards as Ch’in, where she saves a princess and a dragon. In this novel she goes westwards. After a brief stop in Terre d’Ange, it’s off to Terra Nova, where she hopes to find Prince Thierry alive and bring him back to Terre d’Ange to deal with an opportunistic regent. Raphael de…
There is both reward and danger in reading the books of a series in close succession. Obviously, it’s easier to see the common threads that tie the books together; it’s easier to appreciate the arc of the characters and how events in one book might later affect events in another. I often deepened my appreciation for many series through an extensive re-read (and the same could be said for “marathoning” television shows). Nonetheless, there always…
With a little over a week left before I return to England, I went to the library and borrowed a few more books. As I was browsing the stacks, I noticed all three of these books next to each other on the shelf. Longtime library conossieurs will share with me the feeling of surprise and elation that one has when discovering the complete set of a series on one’s to-read list is there, ready to…
So you wrote a highly-successful trilogy. Congratulations! What now? Well, you could write a sequel trilogy: new narrator, same old world and intrigue. Some writers want to milk the cash cow for all it's worth. Other writers, like Jacqueline Carey, create worlds compelling enough to justify returning to them time and again. Sinking into Kushiel's Scion is like having an old friend come to visit: all the things that you remember are there, but…
We have arrived at the end of a second trilogy, and I'm feeling regret—but not in a good way. Kushiel's Mercy at first seems like everything we need to send Imriel and Sidonie out in style. This is the culmination of Imriel's adventures, his final chance to sever himself from the taint of traitor's blood. And it's the final chapter in a slow, simmering love story.
Going into Kushiel's Mercy, Carey has set up…
This is the first book in the series since Kushiel's Dart that I would really classify as romance. There have been romantic subplots in the interim, but nothing like the romance between Phèdre and Joscelin from the first book. Jacqueline Carey is trying to rebottle that lightning in Kushiel's Justice. It doesn't quite work, but there are some good secondary effects that, in the end, make this book better than Kushiel's Scion.
It's…
I picked up Kushiel's Dart because I noticed one of the later books in this series at the library, but I wanted to start at the beginning. I'm glad for that. Jacqueline Carey weaves a dense, intricate narrative--I would have been lost had I started in the middle!
Carey's writing was great, although the prose was often indigo-bordering-on purple, and I could have done with a little less exposition. There were times when the world-building…
Soon after my return to Terre d'Ange in Kushiel's Chosen, I'm back for round three: Kushiel's Avatar. Let's do this.
We begin "ten years later…" with a recap of the previous two books, reminding us who this Phèdre chick is and why we care. Specifically, we recall the contribution of Hyacinthe, a Romani—sorry, Tsingano—prince and lifelong friend of Phèdre. Way back in Kushiel’s Dart (remember that? remember?), Hyacinthe saved Phèdre from having…
Screw magic. Give me some political fantasy any day, and I'm a happy reader.
I liked Kushiel’s Dart. I'm not sure if there's a definite quality improvement or if I'm going too easy on this one, but I loved Kushiel's Chosen.
The Kushiel's Legacy series takes place in a sort of Fantasy Counterpart Culture world where it's Europe, only not. From this starting point, Jacqueline Carey creates a world that, while somewhat similar…